The Tyranny of Email. No, all email isn’t bad, but if you use it incorrectly, it’ll mess you up.
There are certain high-profile people who are using email incorrectly and, as a result, keep predicting the death of email.
Thanks, Steve!
I’ve been working on the nnrss.el backend for Gnus, doing things like making it find content:encoded, pubDate, rendering the body as HTML, making the links to the article hyperlinks, and integrating my rss-helper.el stuff. With the exception of the URL fetching (which still needs to be smoothed out), it should be quite nice.
In the meantime, I’ve come across several problems with xml.el and offered patches.
In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council decided that Iraq was in “material breach” of previous resolutions but gave Iraq “a final chance to comply with its disarmament obligations.” Since then, the threat of military force has been decisive in getting inspectors back into Iraq, putting pressure on Saddam finally to comply, and in building an international consensus for the disarmament of Iraq. The Security Council also “warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations” if it did not comply.
Yet those “serious consequences” need not be war against the people of Iraq. The consequences should mean further and more serious actions against Saddam Hussein and his regime, rather than a devastating attack on the people of Iraq.
Nicolai Berdyaev‘s War and Eschatology is, like all his works that I’ve read, thought-provoking. He echos many truths and then adds some perspective I’ve missed. For instance:
The end of the world and history is a Divine-human deed and it presupposes the activity and creativity of man. The end is not something merely awaited, but the rather prepared for. It is impossible to consider the end merely as an immanent chastisement and desolation. The end is likewise a task for man, the task of the transfiguration of the world. “For lo all is made new” refers also to man. The end of the world is a new heaven and a new earth. But the path to this transformation is not a worldly, gradual evolution, this path lies through tragic catastrophes, through desolations. In order to accomplish the transfiguration of the world, i.e. in order that God’s design should succeed, man ought to progress, ought to make creative acts, ought to respond to the call of God.
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Quite false is the distinction between the morality of personal acts and the morality of social acts, and it had fatal consequences within the history of Christianity. Every personal act is as such also a social act, it possesses a social effect to a certain degree and extent. Every social act is as such also a personal act, since beyond it stands a man. Man is an integrally whole being and he discloses himself in the acts of his life.
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The Kingdom of God cometh imperceptibly, without theatrical effects. It approaches in every triumph of humanness, in real liberation. In genuine creativity there comes nigh the end of this world, a world of inhumanity, of slavery, of inertia.
Berdaev is my segue into Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Shelley Power’s Uncompromising Individualism.
Joi Ito‘s paper on Emergent Democracy has been getting a lot of play recently. This response from Dee Hock is great reading:
As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet.
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The failure of democracy to scale is also not complicated to understand. The founding fathers of this country, the “egalitie, fraternitie and libertie” of France and most other liberals that moved society toward freedom and liberty in the 1700′s could not have been expected to visualize the growth of populations, radical evolution of science, vast increases of technology and incredible increases in mobility of information, money, goods, services and people.
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I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success. A government that could continually evolve to ensure that no matter affecting the public good or the health of the planet fails to be disclosed, examined and understood. Or that any existing organization could escape being confronted with synthesized opinions and alternatives that would swiftly emerge. Such an organization based on rights of participation and withdrawal and consent of the participants could be something entirely new in this tired world. Now that would be something truly worthy of the best within us and the best among us. And a great deal of fun in the bargain!
Turns out that the sendmail bug that I spent some time fixing last week was known to the U.S. Government back in December. I’m not sure what to think, except to say that I suspect that this will not feel good to System Administrators not under U.S. jurisdiction.
This week, in response to an old email that popped up when I restored some backups, I wrote a patch that added HTTPS support to HTTP::Daemon.
Earlier this week, I managed to trash this server. Here is an editted email that I sent to Jeff (who came clean with his own goofup) about what happened.
Well… I was an idiot.
It started when I saw that /var was at 98%. I decided to go and get some space. I thought “hey, isn’t that last partition on the first disk free?”, and I checked parted, (which had it marked “lvm” .. my first clue), but, being the stupid person that I am, I somehow became convinced (without checking) that it wasn’t used. So I did “mkfs” on it.
Now, at this point, things were probably still recoverable. That partition was the last disk in a LVM concatenation and, most likely, didn’t have anything on it. If I had checked, I could have found that it was actually in use by LVM and removed the disk from the concatenation and, again, most likely, everything would have been fine.
But, I didn’t check. I rebooted.
Of course, the logical volume where all the website and mail data is kept didn’t come up. Wonderful.
At first, I thought I might be able to use vgcfgrestore to get the data back. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t find any way to get it back with the last disk missing.
So, I resigned myself to restoring from backup. Problem: No backups since the 28th. So, five days of email and site changes are lost.
But, I couldn’t get amrestore to work. I kept getting the following:
sym53c1010-66-1: SCSI parity error detected: SCR1=3 DBC=110071f1 SBCL=ae st0: Error with sense data: Current st09:00: sense key Aborted Command Additional sense indicates Initiator detected error message received
(which looks like it may be the result of cabling).
Still, I could read the tapes. That is, I could read the headers Amanda put on the tapes, so I knew that at least some of the data was getting too the tape. Luckily, I had used tar (instead of xfsdump) and Amanda tapes have headers that tell you exactly how to extract the data without using Amanda.
At this point, I decided to go to sleep and work on it in the morning.
The next morning, I took the tapes into work where they have a DLT drive and pulled the data off thanks to Amanda‘s design, which makes recovery possible even without having Amanda installed.
Lots of dumb moves on my part throughout this process. I feel like a total idiot.
Japan Times: Unlike the Kurds, the Assyrians are all but ignored in discussions over Iraq’s future.
Beware: geeky esoterica.
It’s kind of funny.
Microsoft has changed the way their Exchange servers interact to use the Internet Standard SMTP. In Exchange 5.5, they did some sort of funky X.400 transport for mail. I’m sure they did it because it probably conformed better to the OSI model than SMTP, but, in the move to Exchange 2000, they decided to scrap this backend and go with one that was smtp-based. Standards! Yummy!
However, it seems that Exchange 2000 had problems with 8BITMIME messages and it looks like this problem comes from the (relatively) immature SMTP implementation that Exchange 2000 uses.
For example, one of the subsidiaries of the company I work for is moving their systems to Exchange 2000. I manage the gateway between the company and the internet and it uses sendmail. There are some Exchange 5.5 servers that mail needs to reach that are just beyond the Exchange 2000 servers. So, the mail routing looks like this:
Internet → sendmail → Exchange 2000 → Exchange 5.5
Now, some European users on the Internet like to set their mail servers to use 8BIT. Fine. Sendmail and Exchange 2000 both advertise their support for it in an ESMTP transfer. Exchange 5.5 doesn’t support it and doesn’t claim to. According to DJB‘s document on 8BITMIME, Exchange 2000 should convert any 8BIT message to 7BIT for Exchange 5.5. I’m told that it does this for mail that originates in the Exchange 2000 realm, but, here is what I’ve observed:
Sendmail gets 8BIT mail from a host on the Internet. It has a route that says the mail goes to the Exchange 2000 server. During the transfer, it sees the Exchange 2000 server supports 8BIT and hands the mail off to the server unchanged.
The Exchange 2000 server should now see that the Exchange 5.5 server doesn’t support 8BIT, convert the mail to Quoted-Printable (or some such) and pass the mail along. It doesn’t. Instead, it sends the mail in 8BIT format to the Exchange 5.5 server, the Exchange 5.5 server becomes confused and ends up bouncing the mail all the way back to the sender.
The fix? I’ve added a new mailer to sendmail called smtp7. When we know that the mail is going to end up on an Exchange 5.5 box (especially if the route to that box contains an Exchange 2000 server), then we force the mail to 7BIT before we send it anywhere. Creating the mailer is as simple as copy and paste: copy the smtp8 mailer and change the name to smtp7, change the 8 in the flags (F=...) to 7.